Occupied
by peggie sue
Summary: /"There are starving babies in Africa, Mellie, she thinks to herself. There are starving mothers with starving babies and they all walk around their pillaged villages without any shirts on just waiting for malaria or something to strike them down onto the sand."/ Mellie in the aftermath of Jerry's birth, spoilers for "Everything's Coming Up Mellie."


She looks at her husband looking at this baby and thinks, Y_ou know what, people make a lot of sacrifices for love. People give up a whole lot more than dignity every day, or sex, or the truth. There are starving babies in Africa, Mellie_, she thinks to herself. _There are starving mothers with starving babies and they all walk around their pillaged villages without any shirts on just waiting for malaria or something to strike them down onto the sand. There are people_, she thinks as she stares at her husband, who is staring down at their child, _with bigger problems than yours._

There are people who would literally die for what she has—an attractive husband to enjoy and grow with and make success with and love with, probably, a house, a law degree, another house, a baby. Great hair. She's got great hair and she thinks that maybe the starving mothers of the third world would be a little jealous of that too. In the last few months of her pregnancy, she'd taken to matching everything. Matching matching matching, the dress to the jacket to the shoe. She owns a shoe in every color of the damn rainbow and she's sure that the cost of her closet alone, organized by color, is somewhere upwards of the Netherlands' GDP last year. She imagines a parade of Aandonga women chasing her through the garden and into the house and up the stairs and into the bedroom closet, finally snagging her someplace between the chaise lounge and a rack of violet blazers she's been meaning to sort by fabric.

She doesn't mean to, but she laughs.

"What's so funny?" her husband asks, eyebrows raised, lips twisted into a smirk.

She meets his eyes, shrugs. "The Aandonga." _Smile real, Mellie, so he remembers you're a person._

His smirk becomes a grin and he does that laugh thing out his nose. "Okay then," he says. "The Aandonga."

God, she loves him. There is nothing like how she loves him.

She'd sell an organ for this man, she'd burn at the stake, she'd be like one of those dogs that tried to shield their owners from the lava when Vesuvius erupted in Pompeii. It's ridiculous, all of it is ridiculous. Fitzgerald Grant IV wiggles in his crib below her and it becomes more ridiculous, because the sight of his little body rolling into a stuffed Pooh toy reminds her that all of it is exactly what she is doing.

Aandonga.

She is selling an organ. She is burning at the stake. She is diving on her owner and disassociating from whatever's coming that will still, probably if not inevitability, kill them both anyway.

X

"Carla!" her voice shriller than she'd anticipated and more bitchy than she'd like. Carla appears at the door to the master bedroom anyway and offers her a polite, submissive smile before focusing her gaze on Jerry. The baby is laying sort of dormantly on the bed, cooing and babbling nicely from his spot between her dress pillows. _God, those are expensive_, she thinks, she should really put a towel down—

"Gah!" her son notices the nanny in the doorway and squeals with delight. He flaps his arms and his lips form these perfect sideways parentheses, the kind that make everything he might be saying sound like a secret. A pernicious whispering voice saying something along the lines of_ I'm not Fitz's baby_ crawls forward in her mind and for a second she imagines her son saying the words out loud, the sound of them delicate and horrifying as they roll through those parentheses lips. _I'm not Fitz's baby._

"Hello, baby boy!" Carla has her hands clasped over her chest—the woman's boobs are gigantic—and swoons over the antics of her infant. "Are you being good for your mama? Are you?"

The singsong tone makes her immediately guilty; she's never talked to her baby that way, her hands have never found their way to her heart as she watches him exist, she has never swooned or blushed or laughed at the size of his toes. She feels cheated because being Not Indifferent to this child is a full time occupation, filed right next to Being Loving, Sincere, and Not Someone Raped By Her Father-In-Law.

"He's been fine, Carla."

Carla walks over to the bed and reaches for Jerry, bouncing him on her big hip as she crosses the room. Mellie feels her heart clench somewhere deep in her chest because she knows what's coming, she knows what this is—yet another moment in which she will turn back to the ironing board or pick up a cardigan to fold or step in the direction of the master bathroom as soon as the nanny attempts to hand her her son.

Her fingers wrap around something tweed and Good Wife looking as soon as Carla gestures for her to take Jerry and she feels genuinely tired of being a terrible human being. She drops the jacket back onto the top of the pile of laundry where she'd found it and sighs. _Gametime_, she thinks. _Megawatt smile_. _This is your one job_.

She feels herself flashing the older woman something shiny and practiced and cheeky, and if her lips were parentheses, the words between them would probably read _At least two thirds of the reason why I'm such a frigid bitch is because the father and namesake of this child might also be my rapist. _"I need you to take him right now, Carla."

"He being whiny?"

She swallows. _No, he is not being whiny, don't you dare blame this child for a goddamn thing_. She puffs her cheeks into another quick smile, just in case. "I'm going to hop in the shower."

X

"Mellie, you have to _HOLD_ him!"

Her husband is yelling at her and she is not holding this baby. She is not doing it, not because she doesn't want to, but because she can't.

Jerry wails and is probably getting Fitz's dress shirt all sweaty. From underneath her covers, she does not care. She is not going to hold this baby, she is not going to do it.

"Mellie, you've been in bed for three days. It's noon, Carla's... sick, or something, or not here—"

Her eyes halfway focus on her husband's face and hey, at least whatever postpartum shit this is has allowed her to perfect her deadpan. "Carla's with her daughter in Philly, Fitz. I told you three time that Kaitlyn was moving into Penn this week." _Bitch bitch bitch. _She would make her voice more acidic if she had the energy.

Fitz stands clueless next to their bed, looking like he doesn't really know how the hell he got dropped into this life. She doesn't either. His tie is thrown over his right shoulder and he's holding the baby, bouncing the baby, trying to make the baby stop crying while simultaneously trying to make her get the fuck out of bed. She had said she hadn't felt well all during the weekend and in the interim Jerry had been Fitz's responsibility exclusively, from morning till night. Fitz hadn't minded because he is a dream.

She remembers those pictures of John John Kennedy playing in the desk of the Oval as his father ran the free world and she thinks that, should he ever find the motivation to rub two thoughts together, her husband might do the same. She imagines a Grant baby or two crawling all over the blue carpet and around the desk and shooting Fitz with a Nerf gun as he finally returns Ban Ki-moon's phone call or something. Soon the babies start to multiply in her mind until there's a fine layer of them coating the floor completely, and then there's another and another, and she happens to be staring at the one baby she actually does have as she shudders in disgust.

"_MELLIE!_" her husband bellows, not so much as angry as he is confused and frustrated, and the baby opens his mouth wide and cries, and cries and cries, because he is terrified of the noise. "I have—I need to be on the phone, in a conference call with Washington in—" he checks his watch, "In thirty-three minutes and there's no way with traffic that—" she rolls over, cuts him off. She will not be bothered by this. She is too tired. "—Mellie! God, Mellie, you have to—you have to hold him! This is _YOUR_ baby! He is _YOUR_ responsibility and Carla is not here today, and—"

"I'm not—I don't—" she wants to say she is not feeling well and doesn't want to get the baby sick, but the lie does not walk up her throat the way she'd like it to. The words do not come. She also wants to say _Wipe your mouth, Fitzgerald_, because the yelling as left little pieces of spit on his chin, but she figures she has enough working against her already.

"Mellie," her husband tries, this time soft and quiet, because he is the most thoroughly self-motivated saint she has ever encountered and she knows he wants to make this story as deprecating as possible for her later, when he recounts to whomever it may concern how difficult it was for him to parent Jerry alone during her little jig with depression. "Honey."

His voice is heavy and scratchy and he runs a soothing hand down the arm of his whimpering son. Or brother. She couldn't tell you which.

Something inside of her twists and separates and her mind doesn't recognize that the arm of that child is hers, the blood of that baby is hers, his dark dark hair is hers. Her husband is holding a stranger and her skeleton wants to fall out of her skin because she doesn't recognize anything, she doesn't, and she can't spend another minute in the body of somebody who'd been—

Baby Jerry sniffles, trying to calm himself down.

"Take him out of here please," she orders quietly.

Fitz's eyes pinch and rest on her, and she is not the only one staring at a stranger.

X

"You're depressed, Mellie." Cyrus is sitting on her husband's side of the bed.

"Was he good for you today?" she asks, because the baby had been pawned off on whichever members of the house staff had been present when her husband had left.

Cyrus swallows, sighs. It is simple when he says, "We had bananas for lunch," and she knows he really means, Y_ou have one job, Mellie Grant, or your husband will never be the president of the United States. _"You know, you look terrible."

"Thank you." She does not roll over to face him.

"Whatever this is, Mellie—"

She cuts him off. "These things don't last, Cy. These things never last. I... I'm—excuse me." _I am going to go take a shower. I will scrub the skin off my body, and then I'll be better, and I will love every moment of my existence with such resolute fervor that people wonder if my face has been surgically pinned into a grin. Is that satisfactory? _

X

She does not like to sit in front of the fireplace, she drinks too frequently, she can no longer watch Law & Order in the middle of the night without feeling ill, but she is fine. She has a baby that calls her Mama, an attractive husband, a house, a law degree, another house. Mellie Grant is fine. She is resolutely fine, stubbornly fine, medicated fine, no-choice-but-to-be fine. There are starving mothers with starving children in Africa that would kill for her life. The cost of her wardrobe is still upwards of the Netherlands' annual GDP.

At night she lays awake and listens to all the breathing next to her. Fitz snores, he denies it but he does, and Jerry is going through a nightmare phase. He will pad into their suite with his little two-year-old feet and tug on her arm in a routine hazy with sleep, and she will reach down and scoop him up and slide over just slightly to give her son room in the bed's middle. He will snuggle into her so his back is up against her chest, and they will watch Daddy snooze on and on. "Daddy sleeps like a bear," Jerry says. _Sweeps yike a bear._

She ruffles his hair, which is curly like her husband's. He does not remember a time when she did not know how to do things like that, like ruffle hair, or share a bed, or watch the bears. "He does."

"Do I sleep like a bear?" _Yike a bear._

She'll yawn. "You do. Like a big, grumbly bear."

"Do you sleep like bear?"

"I don't know, baby. Probably. Go to sleep." She'll squeeze him closer because she's not worried about her skin leaking all that horror onto his tiny body anymore and Fitz will pop one eye open from across the bed. _YES_, he mouths, a silent whisper. The Governor of California has spoken for the millionth night in a row, and yes, she does, she sleeps like bear.

The world becomes very quiet. The snoring picks up again. She will wake up tomorrow and be Loving, Sincere, Not Someone Raped By Her Father-In-Law. She will wake up tomorrow and be fine, and she will go to bed, and her child will whisper to her very quietly across a pillow about his father, and for as long as the third and fourth Fitzgerald Grants to grace the planet love her, she won't mind being occupied by the occupation of existing. For as long as they love her, she will wear endless dress suits and matching shoes, she will tell herself about the Aandonga tribe, she will host Thanksgiving, will move to Washington, will move to Mars.

_This is your job, Mellie Grant._

Her son's knee, clad in rocket pajamas, bumps against her as he sleeps. Most nights, she doesn't jump.

_This is your job._


End file.
